Every landlord has fantasized about this tenant: the rent arrives on time. No complaints. No maintenance calls. No arguments with the neighbors. Months go by and you occasionally remember: "Oh, right. I own that place."

Perfect tenant. Or so you think.

Then one day the tenant moves out. You walk through the property and discover why he never called. There’s been a slow leak under the kitchen sink for two years. His solution was a bucket. There’s water damage behind the cabinet. A window hasn’t closed properly for three winters. An electrical outlet stopped working, so somebody came up with a homemade solution that would probably give an electrician nightmares. Nobody called because, from the tenant’s point of view, these problems had been “handled.”

Then there are the stories that move beyond deferred maintenance into landlord folklore. I know of tenants who buried dead animals in the yard. No joke. And I don’t mean a six-year-old holding a funeral for his hamster in a shoebox. Animals. Plural. Imagine discovering that your rental property has quietly acquired its own pet cemetery.

Then there’s furniture. You rent a furnished property. The tenant moves out. So does the furniture. Beds. Chairs. Television. Whatever apparently fits through the door. At some point you’re standing in an empty room wondering whether you’re doing a move-out inspection or investigating a burglary.

And that’s the uncomfortable thing about the tenant who never calls. Sometimes silence means: “Everything is fine.” Sometimes it means: “I really don’t want the landlord coming over here.” Those are two very different situations.

I think landlords naturally train themselves to dislike contact. The phone rings and it probably means work. The tenant texts and it might mean money. There’s a leak. Something broke. Somebody is complaining. The AC stopped working on Sunday morning. So the tenant who never contacts me feels profitable.

But perhaps I should actually want my tenants to bother me a little. “The toilet keeps running.” “I noticed a stain on the ceiling.” “The AC sounds different.” “The fence is starting to lean.” “The window is getting difficult to close.” Those messages may annoy me today. They may save me thousands of dollars two years from now. Because small problems have an irritating habit of becoming large problems when nobody tells the person who owns the building.

And there’s another lesson here that applies well beyond tenants: Silence is not evidence that everything is fine. It only means nobody is telling me anything.

Maybe the genuinely perfect tenant isn’t the one I never hear from. Maybe it’s the tenant who pays on time, takes reasonable care of the property and calls me before a $200 problem turns into a $5,000 problem. I can live with that kind of nuisance.

So I’m curious about the horror stories. What’s the worst thing you’ve discovered after a “perfect tenant” who never bothered you finally moved out?